Key Specs

‘Enormous!’ That was the first word out of everyone’s mouth in the office, the second they laid eyes on Thermaltake’s super-sized V14 Pro CPU cooler. Standing 161mm high and with a length and width of 171mm and 100mm respectively, the V14 pro dwarfs every other CPU cooler that’s made its way into the WinLabs.

The heatsink features a polished copper base and straddling this are a maze of fins and heatpipes that, let’s be honest, just look cool. In all there are six long copper heatpipes and these dissipate heat to 98 copper fins, which immediately told us the V14 Pro would offer amazing performance.

On putting the cooler to the test, our suspicions were confirmed as the V14 Pro proved a heat-buster like no other cooler we’ve tested. Slapping it onto our 3.2GHz Intel QX9770 45nm processor, the temperature readout listed 32-degrees Celsius on idle and 39-degrees under full load. This was with the gigantic 140mm cooling fan purring along at top 1600rpm speed. Despite the fan running at top speed however, it wasn’t too obtrusive and, dialing the speed down to 1000rpm, it was almost completely silent.

Moving on to overclocking, the V14 Pro blew us away. We were able to squeeze an additional 800MHz from our CPU and temperatures were only four and seven degrees higher in terms of idle and full load. Brilliant.

The only downsides then are the fact that this Thermaltake heatsink is somewhat expensive and just won’t fit inside small and medium tower ATX cases.

Verdict: With its superlative performance, the V14 Pro is7 a serious alternative to entry-level water cooling kits.